Commentators are taking note of the five-year anniversary of the fiscal stimulus that President Obama enacted during his first month in office. Those who don’t like Obama are still asking “if the fiscal stimulus was so great, why didn’t it work?” What is the appropriate response?
October 4 is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics routinely reports the jobs numbers for the preceding month. Is the havoc created by our current political deadlock over fiscal policy showing up as job losses? We have no way of knowing. On October 1 the BLS closed for business, like many other “non-essential” parts of the government. There will be no more employment numbers until the shutdown ends.
Last week, Wall Street economic analysts responded to the usual surveys as to what they thought the upcoming employment numbers would be. (These surveys are what the media refers to each month when they tell you that employment rose or fell “more than economists expected.”) The median forecast in last week’s Bloomberg survey, for example, was a prediction that the BLS would report that “Payrolls increased by 175,000,” the biggest gain in four months. But there was no word on how many of the respondents recognized that there would in fact probably be no number at all on October 4, because the Labor Department would have been closed by the government shutdown.
“Does Debt Matter?” is the question posed by The International Economy to 20 commentators:
“The recent scrutiny of the popularized version of the Rogoff-Reinhart thesis (that growth plummets when debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP) makes clear there are no simple formulas for determining the risks in the level of a nation’s debt. …Can a realistic guide be fashioned for determining whether a nation’s debt has reached a danger zone? Or are countries from here on expected to pursue fiscal reforms only if and when a crisis sets in?”